Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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itself, under weak Valois rulers, eventually led to the combined Anglo-Burgundian attack on the French monarchy of the early 15th century, which shattered the unity of the realm. At the height of the English and Burgundian successes in the 1420’s, virtually the entire traditional demesne of the royal house in Northern France lay under alien control, while Charles VII was driven into flight and exile in the South. The general story of the eventual recovery of the French monarchy and the expulsion of the English armies is well known. For our purposes here, the critical legacy of the long ordeal of the Hundred Years’ War was its ultimate contribution to the fiscal and military emancipation of the monarchy from the limits of the prior mediaeval polity. For the war was only won by abandoning the seigneurial ban system of knightly service, which had proved disastrously ineffective against the English archers, and creating a regular paid army whose artillery proved the decisive weapon for victory. To raise this army, the first important country-wide tax to be collected by the monarchy was granted by the French aristocracy – the taille royale of 1439, which became the regular taille des gens d’armes in the 1440’s.1 The nobility, clergy and certain towns were exempt from it, and in the course of the next century the legal definition of nobility in France became hereditary exemption from the taille. The monarchy thus emerged strengthened in the later 15th century to the extent that it now possessed an embryonic regular army in the compagnies d’ordonnance, captained by the aristocracy, and a direct fiscal levy not subject to any representative control.
On the other hand, Charles VII made no attempt to tighten central dynastic authority in the Northern provinces of France, when they were successively reconquered: in fact, he promoted assemblies of regional Estates and transferred financial and judicial powers to local institutions. Just as the Capetian rulers had accompanied their extension of monarchical control with cession of princely appanages, so the early Valois kings combined reassertion of royal unity with provincial devolution to an entrenched aristocracy. The reason in both cases was the same: the sheer administrative difficulty of managing a country the size of France with the instruments of rule available to the dynasty. The coercive and fiscal apparatus of the central State was still very small: Charles VII’s compagnies d’ordonnance never numbered more than 12,000 troops – a force entirely insufficient for control and repression of a population of 15 million.2 The nobility thus retained autonomous local power by virtue of its own swords, on which the stability of the whole social structure ultimately depended. The advent of a modest royal army had even increased its economic privileges, the institutionalization of the taille securing nobles a complete fiscal immunity they had not hitherto enjoyed. Charles V’s convocation of Estates-Generals, an institution which had lapsed for centuries in France, was thus inspired precisely by his need to create a minimal national forum in which he could induce the various provincial estates and towns to accept taxation, ratify treaties and provide advice on foreign affairs: its sessions, however, rarely granted proper satisfaction to his demands. The Hundred Years’ War thus bequeathed to the French monarchy permanent troops and taxes, but little new civilian administration on a national scale. English intervention had been cleared from French soil: Burgundian ambitions remained. Louis XI, who succeeded in 1461, tackled both internal and external opposition to Valois power with grim resolution. His steady resumption of provincial appanages such as Anjou, systematic packing of municipal governments in the major towns, arbitrary exaction of heavier taxes and quelling of aristocratic intrigues, greatly increased the royal authority and treasury in France. Above all, Louis XI secured the whole eastern flank of the French monarchy by encompassing the downfall of its most dangerous rival and enemy, the Burgundian dynasty. Fomenting the Swiss cantons against the neighbouring Duchy, he financed the first great European defeat of feudal cavalry by an infantry army: with the rout of Charles the Bold by the Swiss pikemen at Nancy in 1477, the Burgundian State collapsed and Louis XI annexed the bulk of the Duchy. In the next two decades, Charles VIII and Louis XII absorbed Brittany, the last major independent principality, by successive marriages to its heiress. The French realm now for the first time bounded all the vassal provinces of the mediaeval epoch, beneath a single sovereign. The extinction of most of the great houses of the Middle Ages and the reintegration of their domains into the lands of the monarchy, threw into prominent relief the apparent dominance of the Valois dynasty itself.
In fact, however, the ‘new monarchy’ inaugurated by Louis XI was by no means a centralized or integrated State. France was redivided into some 12 governorships, administration over which was entrusted to royal princes or leading nobles, who legally exercised a wide range of regalian rights down to the end of the century and factually could act as autonomous potentates well into the next.3 Moreover, there now also developed a cluster of local parlements, provincial courts created by the monarchy with supreme judicial authority in their areas, whose importance and numbers steadily grew in this epoch: between the accession of Charles VII and the death of Louis XII, new parlements were founded in Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen and Aix. Nor were urban liberties yet gravely curtailed, although the position of the patrician oligarchy within them was reinforced at the expense of the guilds and small masters. The essential reason for these far-reaching limitations of the central State remained the insurmountable organizational problems of imposing an effective apparatus of royal rule over the whole country, amidst an economy without a unified market or modernized transport system, in which the dissociation of primary feudal relations in the village was by no means complete. The social ground for vertical political centralization was not yet ready, despite the notable gains registered by the monarchy. It was in this context that the Estates-General found a new lease of life after the Hundred Years’ War, not against but with the revival of the monarchy. For in France, as elsewhere, the initial impulse for the convocation of the Estates was the dynastic need for fiscal or foreign policy support from the subjects of the realm.4 In France, however, the consolidation of the Estates-General as a permanent national institution was blocked by the same diversity which had obliged the monarchy to accept wide political devolution even in the hour of its unitary victory. It was not that the three estates were especially divided socially when they met: the moyenne noblesse dominated their proceedings without much effort. But the regional assemblies which had elected their deputies to the Estates-General always refused to mandate them to vote national taxes; and since the nobility was exempt from the existing fisc, it had little incentive to press for the convocation of the Estates-General.5 The result was that since the French kings were unable to get the financial contributions they wanted from the national Estates, they gradually ceased to summon them at all. It was thus the regional entrenchment of local seigneurial power, rather than the centralist drive of the monarchy, which frustrated the emergence of a national Parliament in Renaissance France. In the short-run, this was to contribute to a complete break-down of royal authority; in the long-run, of course, it was to facilitate the task of Absolutism.
In the first half of the 16th century, Francis I and Henry II presided over a prosperous and multiplying realm. There was a steady decrease of representative activity: the Estates-General had lapsed again; the towns were no longer summoned after 1517 and foreign policy tended to become a more exclusively royal preserve. Legal officials – maîtres de requêtes – gradually extended the juridical rights of the monarchy, and parlements were overawed by special sessions or lits de justice in the presence of the king. Control of appointments in the ecclesiastical hierarchy was gained by the Concordat of Bologna with the Papacy. But neither Francis I nor Henry II were yet anything like autocratic rulers: they both consulted frequently with regional assemblies and carefully respected traditional noble privileges. The economic immunities of the Church were not infringed by the change of patronage over it (unlike the situation in Spain, where the clergy were heavily taxed by the monarchy). Royal edicts still in principle needed formal registration by the parlements to become law. Fiscal revenues doubled between 1517 and the 1540’s, but the tax-level at the end of Francis I’s reign was not appreciably above that of Louis XI sixty years earlier, although prices and incomes had risen greatly in the interval:6 the direct fiscal yield as a proportion of national wealth thus actually fell. On the other hand, the issue of public bonds to rentiers from 1522 onwards helped to maintain the royal treasury comfortably. Dynastic prestige at home was meanwhile assisted by the constant external wars in Italy into which the Valois rulers led their nobility: for these became a well-established outlet for the perennial pugnacity of the gentry. The